Antibiotics could treat chronic back pain

In what could be a breakthrough in pain research, a new study suggests that some cases of chronic back pain could be as simple to treat as a case of strep throat. The research, published in the _European Spine Journal, _concluded that about 40 percent of chronic back pain cases could be successfully treated with a course of antibiotics.

Roughly 80 percent of all Americans will suffer from lower back pain at least once in their lives, and a significant portion of them will develop chronic lower back pain. The problem is so widespread that lower back pain is one of the more common reasons for absence from work in the U.S.

The treatment plan involving antibiotics is based on a newly discovered link between long term back pain and a bacterial infection called Propionibacterium acnes – the same bacteria behind the teenage curse of acne.

For the study, researchers divided 162 volunteers, all with chronic lower back pain due to a slipped disk and inflammation, into two groups. One group received doses of Amoxicillin and clavulanate for 100 days. The other group received a placebo. In 80 percent of cases, the antibiotic treatment effectively reduced disability and lower-back pain.

If the results of the trial can be confirmed in larger studies, the antibiotics treatment could offer pain sufferers a simpler, better and much cheaper option than surgery.

Flu in pregnancy may increase child’s bipolar risk

A bout of the flu during pregnancy could increase the unborn child’s risk of the developing bipolar disease later in life, according to a study published in JAMA Psychiatry.

The researcher examined a group of 814 expectant mothers and their children to find out how womb conditions affect the health of a child throughout his or her life. They found that when the mother was sick with the flu during her pregnancy, her child was four times more likely to develop bipolar disorder later in life.

However, experts note that the risk of bipolar disease due to a mother’s flu remains low overall, and that women should not be unduly worried about the findings. They do, however, advise pregnant women to receive a seasonal flu shot.

Bipolar disorder causes intense mood swing ranging from depression and despair to joy and loss of inhibition. These mood swings can sometimes last months at a time. The disorder does not usually present in children until their teenage years or their 20s.

Europeans have recent common ancestor

A new study published in the journal PLOS Biology found that all Europeans shared a common ancestor only 1,000 years ago. This means that people of European decent are much more closely related than previous genetic research had suggested.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, analyzed 500,000 spots on the genome of 2,000 Europeans and calculated the length of their shared segments of DNA. The longer the stretch of identical DNA between two people, the more likely they are to share a more recent common ancestor. The results revealed that Europeans had a common ancestor only 1,000 years ago.

They also found that Italians are less closely related to one another than people from other European countries because Italians have had a large population without significant migrations for several thousand years. People from the United Kingdom, on the other hand, were found to be more closely related to people from Ireland than to their fellow countrymen, possibly because so many people migrated from Ireland to the UK over the last several hundred years. The researchers also found that people in Eastern Europe were slightly more related to each other than were those in Western Europe.

Rather than focusing primarily on migrations from tens of thousands of years ago as most genetic research does, this study allowed researchers to examine more recent patterns of population movements.